Someone told me that as I was making my way to the Left
Forum at Pace University in lower Manhattan Saturday morning.
Since I’ve been a virtual
connoisseur of the legendary Conservative Political Action
Conference, that annual running of right-wing Republican leaders and lemmings, this didn’t seem to bode well for my
participation on a panel entitled “Prospects for a Left-Right
Alliance in the Fight Against Empire.”

But let’s be frank, this wasn’t like CPAC. First
off, there would never be a panel at CPAC called “Prospects
for a Right-Left Alliance in the Fight Against Empire,” mostly
because anyone who wants to host a panel and/or booth at CPAC has to pay upwards
of $5,000 for the privilege,, I am told. The only
organizations that have the kind of dough to consistently
participate and steer the agenda are true believers and flush with cash. They are also completely
intolerant when it comes to embracing counter-ideological ideas,
like say, including gay Republicans or conservationists into the
platform, or criticizing war, much less making common cause with the
Left on any issue.

Antiwar vigil staged outside the Left Forum in NYC on Saturday.

On the contrary, the vast majority of the hard-Left types
represented at Pace Saturday didn’t seem to have that kind of
money hanging around, nor they did they necessarily need it. The
several hundred panel slots were free — anyone who wanted to pull
together a session needed only submit an application for approval.

Apparently the powers that be at the Left Forum this year did
not think a panel exploring the common ground between the Right and
Left an imminent threat to the progressives’ survival as a
movement, so they gave our host, Evan Siegel, a mathematics professor and self-described liberal but reader of
publications such as Antiwar.com and The
American Conservative, a Saturday slot and a classroom.

What I found overall was pretty heartening, if not heartwarming,
and I daresay, fellow panelist Jacob
Hornberger, president and founder of the libertarian Future of
Freedom Foundation (who like me, eschews labels but was asked to
represent “the Right”), felt the positive vibe too.

“I thought the panel went great,” he told me
afterwards.

“By
focusing on the particular theme of the panel — war, empire, and
civil liberties — and staying away from differences that the
panelists have in other areas, I think the dynamics were entirely
positive and that everyone — panelists and audience — were able to
bring a lot of light to these burning issues of our time.”

Hornberger even passed out a couple boxes full of FFF’s
white paper on economic liberty to the attendees moving in and out
of the exhibit halls (though he half-joked they might all
come after him once they got around to reading it).

Maybe it was a case of exceeding low expectations, but something
happened, like a tiny break in the clouds. Mostly it was the
audience, they were not hostile, but rather receptive and perhaps a
little more than exhausted with the current political climate, one
that demanded we all choose sides, all the time. Far from
caricatured, they were all ages, men and women, hippies and squares.
Even a Right-leaning New Yorker turned out after I mentioned the
session on a recent American Conservativeblog
post.

“I think it’s very clear, beyond the caricatures,
that there is a lot of natural common ground,” said one
audience member who did not want to be named because of his work in
the news media. “Between all this categorizing — as
right wing or libertarians or what you call “crunchy cons,”
and then on the Left, which has it’s own baggage … I
wish we could all get beyond that.”

At first of course, it seemed all that baggage might indeed
smother the panel. What did Erykah Badu sing — “One day, all them bags, gone get in your way”?

There were a tense few seconds in which the baggage threatened to derail
the whole thing. Panelist Chip Berlet, a dedicated right-wing hunter and
certainly no friend of Antiwar.com, suggested he was all for a coalition
with the Right but was unsure how to keep its fringe out. What to do when
they start showing up at rallies with their xenophobic, racist signs? He
said Republican candidate Ron Paul suffered from this baggage most of all.

At that, co-panelist John Walsh, a self-described liberal who has been
volunteering for Paul’s campaign in several states (he’s also been writing
for Antiwar.com since 2006 and is involved in the
trans-ideological Come Home America movement), hit back saying that Paul
has long disavowed the things said or written in his name that would
suggest he sympathized with racist or anti-Semitic fringe elements. “What
else do you want him to do, go out and hang himself?” Walsh demanded.

A pause, a deep breath, and then Hornberger put things into perspective:
of any of them there that day, he should have been the most ostracized and
the most uncomfortable, given the wave of
pro-communist literature stacked up in the exhibit halls downstairs —
tomes he hadn’t seen since the early 1970s.

Sharing a stage with these disciples was at best, a scary
prospect, at worst, a car wreck, but Hornberger said
their differences meant little to him right now. What matters
most was defeating the thrust of empire — the rampant
Executive Authority of the White House, the ballooning defense
contracting industry, the ruinous Global War on Terror that spawned
the Patriot Act and more recently, the National Defense
Authorization Act (NDAA).

“The
root of the problem is the U.S. government’s imperialist,
interventionist foreign policy,” he said.

“It
engenders the anger and hatred among foreigners, which then
manifests itself in retaliatory terrorist strikes, which are then
used as the excuse to clamp down on civil liberties in the name of
‘keeping us safe,’” he added. “That’s why
it’s vitally necessary to abandon that foreign policy and restore a
constitutional republic to our land.”

We need to band together to resolve this first, and then, only
then, could they tackle the other issues that divide them.

Berlet looked skeptical, but nodded several times in agreement
with what his fellow panelists had to say over the course of the
nearly two-hour discussion, not the least of which was a point that
Walsh made, that only Paul
has been talking about ending the Drug War and mandatory drug
sentences that in part keep African Americans incarcerated at
higher rates than anyone else in the U.S. These are two issues high
on the list of Liberal causes today. Not even Barack Obama has
bothered to make this a priority since taking office.

Conservative writer Mark Brennan was probably the unlikeliest of
attendees on Saturday. But Brennan said he is antiwar, and often
finds himself at odds with his right-wing friends over the issue
of foreign policy and civil liberties.

We have to stop the war, he charged after the panel was over,
“and if these are the guys who I’m going to do it with,
then so be it,” he said, pointing to the other departing Left
Forum participants, who were leaving to make way for another battery
of panels with names like “Overcoming Climate Change: The
EcoSocialist Path,” and “Occupy Malcolm-X- By Any Means
Necessary.”

“If you took this entire conference and locked them all in
a room for a month they couldn’t come up with a sign that
offended me enough to keep me from attending a rally together,”
he said. “Let’s be serious. The whole taxonomy of labels
and names is not working anymore. We’re coming together to
stop the murder.”

Noah, a self-described Occupy Wall Street activist, said, “I
loved this forum,” because it allowed for a frank discussion
on where the progressive antiwar movement fell down on the job
during the Bush Administration. “The whole Left, so much of it
got sucked up into the (Democrat John) Kerry campaign” in
2004, and lost its way yet again, supporting Obama and ignoring the
signs that he, too, would fail them on the war.

Noah said the Occupy movement also led him to believe that “that
maybe it’s time to open up people’s minds to libertarian
and anarchist thought.”

Now that’s not something one hears every day at the Left
Forum. But it’s clear that while it’s a small victory,
it feels good to clear the air with people like Noah and some of the
other folks I had the pleasure of talking candidly with on Saturday,
who probably thought there was no light between me and Jacob
Hornberger and Rush Limbaugh when they saw our names and
affiliations in the program. In fact they were probably shocked when
Hornberger, dressed in a suit that made him appear more fitted for a
banker’s conference than an anti-banker rally, declared at one
point that he felt more comfortable there than at CPAC.

“I do not know whether the forum was useful to those who
were there,” Walsh told me, however, “the very fact that
it was held speaks volumes about the breakdown of the Left/Right
divide on the issues of war and Empire. There is an
open-mindedness developing on this question among progressives – and
that is largely due to Ron Paul and his campaign.”

While that might be a little bit of wishful thinking (there
still seems to be whole lot of suspicion of Paul among the Left), it
is worth noting that the Ron Paul types were the only members of the
so-called Right who did not rush to mock the Occupy protesters when
they attempted to take over public squares in cities and towns all
over the country last year. They tend to see Billy clubs and pepper
spray and know it could be any American, including themselves, on
the receiving end some day.

One couldn’t say the same for people like right-wing R.
Stacy McCain and the commentariat on his website, “The Other
McCain.” He came up with this winner
of a blog post as dozens of protesters were
arrested, many of them Left Forum participants, marching to
re-occupy Zuccotti Park on Saturday night:

That’s
the way to do it, NYPD! Give ‘em a sweet taste of the
nightstick!

But
doesn’t NYPD have Tasers? Jack ‘em up with some high
voltage!

Billy
clubs, Tasers, pepper spray, whatever it takes to keep Marxist scum
off the streets of New York, do it. These whiny deadbeats are a
menace to public safety — scabies! tuberculosis! rape! —
and if they refuse to disperse peacefully, they have thereby
declared war on the law-abiding citizens of New York, whom the NYPD
are sworn to protect and serve.

There
are reports that a handful of Occupy protesters were hospitalized
with injuries. Unfortunately, it was only a handful, and none
of those injuries were wounds from 9mm pistols or 12-gauge riot
guns.

Of course McCain insisted this was mere “hyperbole,”
or “hypothetical atrocity rhetoric,” justified by his
justifiable hatred for Communism and the Occupy movement, which he
calls an “iteration of that (Red) menace.” Even if
McCain were seeking some sort of cathartic release, he seems blind
to the fact that his general reaction to the police crackdown —
not to mention the comments from his readers, which ranged from
ham-fisted to horrifying — is more Stalinist than any of these
tree-hugging, anti-capitalist Marxists would ever endeavor to be.

The fact is, our little session was not only about convincing
liberals that we are not R. Stacy McCain, but finding one another,
and agreeing on some common language. We were all on the same page
already; we just had to get past the labels.

That’s exactly what Hornberger had suggested, that “the
fun is in finding people … I think our quest is finding people”
who believe in the same principles, “rather than changing
anyone’s minds.”

In building this broader consensus, he suggested, we might
someday reach a saturation point of public opinion that could tip
the scales in our favor.

“Everyone nodded and smiled or laughed when I commented on
how tired I was of going to rallies with nothing but the usual
left-wing participants,” said Siegel.

“This panel was a huge breath of fresh air. Wish we had
ten times as many people there,” he added.

Maybe next time.

I don’t think all this makes me a “Red,” but I
think for one day, at least, one session, we were truly colorblind,
and for that it was worth it.

201203931710 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2Fvlahos%2F2012%2F03%2F19%2Fa-turn-right-at-the-left-forum%2FA+Turn+Right+at+the+Left+Forum2012-03-20+06%3A00%3A10Kelley+B.+Vlahoshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2F%3Fp%3D2012039317 to “A Turn Right at the Left Forum”

"We need to band together to resolve this first, and then, only then, could they tackle the other issues that divide them."

Quote of the century to date. By far the greatest danger to our country and our liberty is this thirst for empire, war and security over liberty. Sane people can all agree upon this, even if we have differing views on other issues. We simply must put aside the political ideologies that keep us divided and unite to address the issues that matter the most.

He has never been one of the good guys. He has always been a Ford Foundation-funded Empire mole within the Left, a gendarme whose assignment was to steer the left away from crucial economic and foreign policy issues on the grounds that "that way lies conspiracism." Berlet wants an ineffectual left that does nothing but talk about transgender victimization, etc.

So, um, yeah. About that war. Was there any sort of anti-war presence at CPAC during the years of 2001-2008? How about a push against the growing security state, warrantless spying, GITMO, etc?

It's true that the Democratic Party (which is anything but with its "superdelegates" and whatnot) barely tolerates the anti-war left, but do you guys honestly believe that you will ever find a resting place in today's GOP?

Fact of the matter is, anti-war "libertarians" are not looking for allies, they are looking for refuge. They are looking for a new host after their old one rejected them. They take it for granted that they are right and those dumb hippy leftists will be doing all of the compromising and they'll be making all the decisions in such an alliance. Oh, and they generally censor anyone who brings up this behavior. Please don't disappoint, antiwar.com!

What Walsh said was dead on. There are too many on either the Right or Left who want a saint to rally behind. Happen to put commas where semicolons are demanded? Sinner! Heretic! … That's the sort of straining for gnats and swallowing of camels nonsense that occupies the idle chattering class and hordes of others. It's simply ludicrous to think that just because you've fallen for the lies promised to you about whatever domestic issues/bribes du-jour are being peddled, while crippling wars are eagerly pursued overseas, that these same liars won't bring the war and it's further enslavement home to you.

So why was I willing to have a conversation with the folks I usually study as enemies? Because I am worried that the State is capable of shutting down dissent whether it is right or left. This is a time for serious conversation about defending civil liberties across the board.

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer, is a longtime
political reporter for FoxNews.com and
a contributing editor at The American Conservative.
She is also a Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine. Her Twitter account is @KelleyBVlahos.